CHAPTER 14: LONDON, ENGLAND
Tuesday, October 12

I'm a Navy man, so we decided to celebrate the Navy's birthday by going to a concert of Vivaldi's Four Seasons at the Church of St. Martin's-In-The-Fields. On Friday evening, off we went and were settled in our seats when I noticed that the program said "Bach and Mahler", not Vivaldi. I scurried off to find out what was going on, and I found out that somebody, I won't say who, but for once it WASN'T ME, got the dates wrong: Bach and Mahler were on Friday while Vivaldi was on Saturday! Oooops! We bailed out real quick and reclaimed out tickets (which very clearly said "Saturday", I might add). So instead of hearing Vivaldi, we heard some street bands in Leicester Square (which is pronounced "Lester" for some reason). As we found out during our first weekend here, that's the place to be on a weekend night. It's jammed with literally thousands of people. We got some ice cream cones at Haagen Dazs and just people-watched a bit, then went over to a theater and saw the movie "Analyze This". It was a great (if unplanned) day.

On Saturday night we went back to the Church of St. Martin's-In-The-Fields. A long time ago, it really was in the fields, but today it's smack on Trafalgar Square. It's a fine 200-year-old church that is now getting a bit shabby around the edges. It has fairly bland gray stone and square lines outside, but it's ornate and imposing inside. It has a large basement grotto where people have been buried over the past 250 years and their marble gravestones are set into the floor. Today the grotto has been converted into a gift shop and cafe. It's an interesting experience to be casually sipping a glass of red wine while standing on somebody's gravestone.

Vivaldi's Four Seasons was definitely worth the wait. It was performed by a superb string ensemble who did a marvelous job with this 300-year-old masterpiece. A CD on the stereo just does not capture its beauty. It was fragile, energetic, and sublimely beautiful. What a wonderful way to spend an evening.

Yesterday we went to see Windsor Castle. This was our last sightseeing outing in the UK. We were absolutely floored by Windsor. It's huge: 13 acres. Over 900 years old. It's even more ornate than Buckingham Palace, as if that's possible. Queen Anne's Doll House is a perfect 1/12 scale model mansion with working lights, running water, flushing toilets, operational elevator, and even a working model vacuum cleaner. The State Apartments are the rooms that are used for official occasions and they are open to the public for tours. Unbelievable. Frankly, we were overwhelmed. It got to the point where we'd walk in to a room and say "Ho, hum, another room the size of a football field, with 40-foot ceilings covered with murals, walls covered in embroidered silk and hand-carved oak, paintings by Rembrandt, Hals, Van Dyke, and Rubens all over the place, more gold than Fort Knox, chairs that haven't been sat in since Queen Elizabeth I planted her royal derriere in it 400 years ago, a 2-ton crystal chandelier, suits of armor, and gilded drapes the size of Nebraska. Same old stuff. Got anything interesting in here??" Unfortunately for us, about two busloads of octogenarian American tourists arrived about the same time we did and jammed up the whole place. A crowd of 'em would cut in front of me then stop dead in their tracks to examine some picayune jewel-encrusted item, or they'd keep pushing when I tried to look at a Durer painting, or they'd just babble inanely and incessantly. I got a serious case of road rage after a while. "Just get outa the way, ya old coot!" "Cut in front of ME, willya?" Good thing I didn't have my Uzi with me (it had been taken by the guards for safekeeping) or there'd be a bunch of dead Yanks right now. The other tourists aside, we had a fabulous time at Windsor today. I think British castles may have spoiled us for the rest of our European trip. If it doesn't have 1000 rooms, we aren't interested. This was a great finish to our UK sightseeing.

Some random observations of London:
- Just down the street from the U.S. Embassy is the Spy Shop, loaded with all kinds of techno wizardry to pry secrets out of your neighbors. Two doors down from it is Counter-Spy Shop, with all kinds of gizmos to neutralize everything its neighbor sells.
- Street numbers don't follow the U.S model. You don't have numbers increasing in regular order, with evens on one side and odds on the other. Nope. Streets change names about every time they make a slight turn or cross an intersection. You can have numbers starting at 1 on one side of the street and increasing as you go down that side, then crossing over to the other side of the street and increasing back down to the starting point. So as you go in one direction, one side will be increasing, and the other decreasing!
- They have some very entertaining flyers in all the telephone booths in the city. You can find similar ads in the back of Hustler magazine. There's evidently an amazing variety of young ladies (and men, too, for that matter) who can do more things to you than you ever dreamed possible and they tell you all about it on their flyer, or even more if you want to call their 900 number.
- Across the street from Charing Cross Station is a wonderful memorial to Oscar Wilde. It's a small coffin-shaped block of marble, topped with a bronze bust of Wilde with a smirk on his face and cigarette in his hand. Labeled "A Conversation with Oscar Wilde", it makes you feel as if you and he were sharing a splendid joke.
- British homeless are much better equipped than their American brethren. We saw two homeless guys sitting on a park bench engrossed in the World Cup rugby match on their palm-sized TV.

Speaking of TV, we are watching a raving lunatic on the telly right now. One of his shtics, besides bashing Americans, is doing all kinds of odd things with household items. For example, he just made a potato bazooka. Yes, that's right: he got a glass tube, dumped most of a can of hair spray into it, pounded a potato into the bottom, stuck it on the stove, and voila! Instant bio-degradable tank killer! (Kids, do not try this at home.) He's forever plugging 220-volt electrical leads into various edible items (tonight it was an onion) to see what colors they turn when the juice is applied. In other words, he's getting paid to do things that every 12-year-old boy is probably doing, anyway.

I think I've pretty much got the Range Rover in shape. It doesn't have a loping "thuda thuda thuda (tick)" sound at idle anymore. Now it has a quiet, steady "burble burble burble (tick)". Okay, so I still haven't fixed that sticking lifter yet. But the various fluids and filters have been changed (some for the first time, evidently), it runs and drives smoothly, and the CD changer is now full of tunes. Nothing like blasting down the M25 warbling "On The Road Again" with Willie Nelson at top volume. I'm hoping the Rover will do us well over the next six to nine months.

So we're now winding up our London stay. Today we're going downtown to get our retiree ID cards. This afternoon we'll pack. Tomorrow morning we will leave for the Netherlands. We have really enjoyed our time in the UK, as you have read. But it's getting colder, the trees are just starting to turn, and it's time to move on to other towns. An article in the paper today said that "dromophobia" is the "fear of crossing streets" ... also the fear of traveling. The article noted that there is no antonym in the dictionary, but proposed "dromomania", which is the "insatiable desire to travel". I guess that's what I've got. I'm fortunate to have Janis with me: she has put up with my dromomaniacal urges quite well so far.

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